Santee, mobile homes end longtime feud

SANTEE  Nearly 17 years of litigation over mobile home park rent control has come to an end in Santee.

With defense costs in excess of $2.4 million — and three lawsuits still pending — the city of Santee reached agreement Wednesday with the owners of Meadowbrook Santee Mobile Home Estates and Cameron’s Mobile Estates to resolve long-standing legal challenges to rent control.

Terms of the settlements are expected to be final in the next few days when all parties sign legal documents and the court gives final approval.

The end result will be that rent at Cameron’s will be adjusted under a city ordinance to increase $50 per year each of the upcoming four years beginning Jan. 1. This will bring the average rent-controlled space at Cameron’s to $585 in 2017.

At Meadowbrook, a one-time rent adjustment of 2.5 percent (nearly $18) will be allowed, bringing the average rent-controlled space to $765 in 2014.

“It’s safe to say that there’s enough for all the parties to hate, but that’s what compromise is all about,” City Manager Keith Till said. “The city has a long track record of looking out for Santee mobile park residents and we did the very best we could here. But clearly the path of never ending litigation could not be maintained.”

The agreements will preserve rent control protections and ensure against further lawsuits over the 20- to 25-year term of the agreements.

Meadowbrook sued the city several times in both state and federal courts several for what they felt was Santee’s “illegal ordinance and illegal taking of their property,” Mayor Randy Voepel said.

Special rent adjustments granted under the ordinance as outlined in the settlement agreements will be limited and, in the case of Cameron’s, will be phased in over a four-year span.

Till said a special “hardship protection provision” has been secured from both park owners to ensure that current tenants with extremely low income will not be forced out of their mobile homes for as long as they chose to stay living in them.

Some of the residents are concerned that the higher rents will put them out on the street.

“This is devastation for some people, some of whom will have to get out of the park,” said Cameron’s resident Diane Mead. “This is going to be devastating for many of the people who can’t afford it, who will have to leave and have no place to go.”

Mead said she pays nearly $350 a month, which she said she knows is low, but for others, “some of these people are on fixed incomes and they’re paying already over $500.”

Santee was pressured to end litigation when the state of California last year abolished low-income housing funding, a key provision of mobile home programs in Santee and throughout the state.

Although Santee has been successful in the past defending its rent control ordinance, the cost of continuing fighting lawsuits indefinitely – and with uncertain outcomes in the future – led to the settlements, Till said.